1555
Peace of Augsburg
Charles V's brother Ferdinand brokered a religious settlement at Augsburg allowing each German prince to choose Lutheranism or Catholicism for his lands. Cuius regio, eius religio became the rule: whose realm, his religion. It held, barely, for sixty years, until the Thirty Years War tore it apart. The exclusion of Calvinists ensured the religious question was only partly resolved, storing tensions that exploded in the Thirty Years' War.
Charles V Begins to Abdicate
In a tearful ceremony at Brussels, the exhausted emperor handed the Low Countries to his son Philip. Over the next year he would surrender Spain, the Americas, and finally the imperial title, and retire to a monastery at Yuste in Extremadura with his clocks and a flock of Flemish tapestries.
Tobacco Reaches France
The French diplomat Jean Nicot, posted to Lisbon, sent tobacco seeds and powder back to Catherine de Medici, who tried them for her migraines. Nicotine, eventually, would be named after him. The herb spread across Europe as a medicine, a pleasure, and soon enough a mortal habit. Nicot's promotion as medicinal herb gave tobacco scientific respectability, long before its addictive properties were understood.
Nostradamus Publishes Les Propheties
The French astrologer Michel de Nostredame published the first edition of his Centuries, nearly a thousand ambiguous quatrains predicting future calamities. Catherine de Medici summoned him to court for consultations. For the next four hundred and fifty years, every catastrophe would be tortured into his rhyme scheme by hopeful interpreters.
Tobacco Seeds Reach Europe
Seeds of the tobacco plant arrived in Europe via Portuguese ships returning from the Americas, and botanists began cultivating the strange American herb for its supposed medical virtues. Within a generation it would spread to every European court, and soon enough to every sailor's pouch. The plant's rapid transformation from curiosity to mass consumer product was one of the fastest New World crop adoptions in the Columbian Exchange.